Praxis Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Praxis is a term most commonly associated with the ability of oppressed groups to change their economic, political, and social worlds through rationally informed reflection and deliberate social action. As advocated and critiqued by contemporary theorists, the term itself is often loosely associated with the melding of theory to liberatory human action.

In classical sociological theory, praxis is connected with Karl Marx and his emphasis on the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Interpretations of Marx’s usage of praxis vary, but most associate a Marxist-based praxis with societal transformation that involves a concomitant change in the proletariat’s material activity, consciousness, and social relations. Hence, Marx is frequently quoted: ”The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (1978 [1844]: 145). Moreover, Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto lays out this theory and plan of praxis: the dual abolition of class and class exploitation in the forms of private property, the patriarchal nuclear family, traditional religion, and country and nation. At issue for Marx is holistic human and social transformation.

Contemporary theorists advocate praxis-based solutions to end the subaltern status of many oppressed groups, including, but not limited to, the colonized, the poor, women, people of color, and gays and lesbians. For many, the institution of education is fundamentally linked to praxis. For instance, Paulo Freire’s (1972) theory of praxis specifically offers Brazilian campesinos as a mechanism that combines reflection and action to transform a psychological, social, political, and economic legacy of imperialism and colonialism. For Freire, praxis is the act of creativity and social change achieved through the oppressed’s own experience and the creative process of education: that is, acquiring and developing literacy and reactive responses to the ruling social and political structures. Hence, praxis and its ends are not preordained, but are, instead, a creative process of becoming.

Bibliography:

Freire, (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Gouldner, A. (1980) The Two Marxisms. Macmillan, London.
Marx, K. (1978) [1844] Theses on Feuerbach. In: Tucker, R. (ed.), The Marx Engels Reader. Norton, New York.
Vrankicki, P. (1965) On the problem of practice. Praxis 1: 41—8.